POLICE RECORDS
The following are extracts concerning this convict, Thomas Harrison, from the police gazettes 1872-1874 called until 1884 Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police, James Barnard Gov't printer.

Thomas Harrison or Harris was suspected of larceny, published 27 September 1872

Warrant for Thomas Harrison or Harris arrest 18th October 1872

Thomas Harrison or Harris arrested 1st November 1872

Thomas Harrison was photographed in this "booking" shot by Nevin on being received from Launceston at the Hobart Gaol in mid February 1874, per police regulations for a sentence of three (3) months or longer. A serial thief, Harrison's sentences in early 1874 earned him a few months of incarceration and discharge on 22 April 1874. But by 1875, he was arrested at the Police Office, Sorell, for being idle and disorderly, and sentenced to another three months at the Hobart Gaol. This information appears on the verso of the photograph held at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, viz:

Prisoner Thomas HarrisonQVMAG:1985_P_0113 and verso

THE FATAL SHORE
Robert Hughes' book The Fatal Shore (1987) includes several prisoner ID photographs by Thomas Nevin which Hughes' publishers sourced from the Archives Office of Tasmania without attribution to Nevin, per this page of photographs:

Page of photographs from The Fatal Shore, p. 450

One of those convict images - last on lower right - is of Thomas Harrison. It is the same image which was printed on the postcard to advertise the exhibition of the T. J. Nevin convict photos at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in 1977, curated by John McPhee. Of the more than 100 photographs of Tasmanian prisoners which were exhibited from the QVMAG collection taken by Nevin, why the curator McPhee and the authors of Nevin's biographical entry Stilwell and Kerr (1922) made the choice of the photograph of Harrison is strange, since it is not typical of the majority of his prisoner photographs which demonstrate the same technical approach used in his vignetted commercial studio portraits of clients, patrons and family members. Possibly Harrison was chosen because of his defiant stare and tattered clothes, signifiers of desperation and social deviance.

The same image appeared again in Joan Kerr and G. Stilwell's entry for Thomas Nevin (1992:568) in the Dictionary of Australian artists : painters, sketchers, photographers and engravers to 1870 (ed) Joan Kerr. The convict is given the name "Thomas Harrison" and the provenance is given as the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. The Archives Office holds a copy either made at the same time as the original capture by Nevin in 1874 - copies were routinely circulated to police stations on the prisoner's discharge - or later, when copies of these cartes-de-visite of 18170s prisoners were circulated to other national collections (AOT, NLA, TMAG) in the 1980s-1990s:

This convict is unnamed in the AOT Photograph Records for some reason. His photograph is subtitled "Convict unidentified - photograph taken at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin" :

AOT Ref: PH30/1/3252

Robert Hughes states in his Introduction to The Fatal Shore (Harvill 1987).

"The idea for this book occurred to me in 1974, when I was working on a series of television documentaries about Australian art. On location in Port Arthur, among the ruins of the great penitentiary and its out-buildings, I realized that like nearly all other Australians I knew little about the convict past of my country. I grew up with a skimpy sense of colonial Australia.

Convict history was ignored in schools and little taught in universities - indeed, the idea that the convicts might have a history worth telling was foreign to Australians in the 1950s and 1960s.

Even in the mid-1970s only one general history of the System (as transportation, assignment and secondary punishment in colonial Australia were loosely called) was in print: A.G.L. Shaw's pioneering study Convicts and the Colonies.

An unstated bias rooted deep in Australian life seemed to wish that "real" Australian history had begun with Australian respectability - with the flood of money from gold and wool, the opening of the continent, the creation of an Australian middle class.

Behind the diorama of Australia Felix lurked the convicts, some 160,000 of them, clanking their fetters in the penumbral darkness. But on the feelings and experiences of these men and women, little was written. They were statistics, absences and finally embarrassments."

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In his own words ...

“I hope that you have not got it in your mind that I am implicated with the ghost“.The Mercury, 4 December 1880

"Defendant said that he was the father of a large number of children, and did not know which one was referred to. (Laughter.)"The Mercury, 11 August 1886

"Mr. Thos Nevin was under the impression that the police should be under stricter supervision."The Mercury, 19 July 1888.

Biography: Professional photographer Thomas James Nevin snr (1842-1923) produced large numbers of stereographs and cartes-de-visite within his commercial practice, and prisoner identification photographs on government contract. His career spanned nearly three decades, from the early 1860s to the late 1880s. He was one of the first photographers to work with the police in Australia, along with Charles Nettleton (Victoria) and Frazer Crawford (South Australia). His Tasmanian prisoner mugshots are among the earliest to survive in public collections, viz. the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston; the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; the Tasmanian Heritage and Archives Office, Hobart; the Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasman Peninsula; the National Library of Australia, Canberra; and the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Thomas J. Nevin's stereographs and portraits are held in public and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland.

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Our Fourteenth Anniversary 2019

Fourteen years ago (before 2005 actually) we started blogging about Tasmanian photographer Thomas J. Nevin (1842-1923). We look forward to another two years at least as the project draws closer to completion. Contributions and donations are most welcome, and many thanks for your involvement.

Notices

DISCLAIMER: We have not voluntarily contributed to any publication which supports the misattribution of Nevin's prisoner/convict photographs (300+ extant) to the non-photographer A.H. Boyd, nor do we condone any attempts by public institutions or private individuals to co-opt the work on these Nevin weblogs and associated sites to apply the misattribution.

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